[Foundation-l] Social networking (was: Analysis of lists statistics: community in decline)

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 8:07 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Social networking features will not help you there. You can't move for
> sites with social networking elements. People don't use them.
>
> Lower participation is probably a mixture of a number of factors:
>
> Wikipedia seems complete. It is now somewhat unusual to look up a
> subject and find nothing.
>
> Wikipedia looks complete for the most part. Red links are increasingly uncommon.
>
> Anyone can edit hits a wall. Can anyone really add anything useful to
> say [[Tank]] or even the better known sub articles such as
> [[Challenger_2_tank]]? Most people are not going to see articles they
> can add something to.
>
> People don't communicate a vast amount for a number of reasons:
>
> 1)lack of need. You don't really need to communicate to find things to
> do or edit.
>
> 2)People are tending to work on rather specialist articles so there
> may be a slight lack of other people to talk to. Lots of people can
> and will talk about the leopard 2 tank the [[Pz-61]] less so.
>
> 3)Information overload. There are still a lot of people trying to tell
> you things. People tend to filter them out and after a while that
> filter becomes a bit aggressive (talk page templates are one example
> of this)

First, I would like to see social networking features on and then to
talk about its usefulness :) It is one thing to use social networking
elements if you have to click 10 times and write 30 characters inside
of very specific userbox; besides that you have to think would this
userbox be deleted in a couple of months... The other thing are social
networking options which would give to you close-to-Facebook interface
inside of your profile.

Second, you are missing the point. You are not the first person in
this discussion who is arguing that there are a lot of different
reasons, even the systematic answer is very obvious. At the other
side, I don't say that a number of different tendencies don't have
their position in the whole situation. Systematic answer: there are
some problems inside of our functioning (possibly, lack of the idea
what we are doing, except that we are doing "a great thing") -> people
don't like to participate as they liked it before -> less contributors
[even almost the same number of readers] -> less activity -> less
readers -> less contributors...

* Lower level of activity is not just related to the English
Wikipedia, it is related to [almost] all projects -- even they have
just ~30.000 articles.
* We missed the whole generation of Internet users. People from
academic expertises in humanities are now much better educated in
computers than they were in 2003.
* However, even English Wikipedia has very low quality articles in,
for example, linguistics. (I am trying to use English Wikipedia as a
starting point and something like 50-50 are chances for me to find a
useful set of articles in linguistics; even I am very well introduced
how to find relevant data on Wikipedia.)

So, even you detected the right problems, even the answer is so
complex that we have to deal with one by one thing (but I don't think
that the answer is *so* complex), we have to deal with them.
Otherwise, we will go down (as we *are* going down; we are just to
high to realize that the end of falling is ultimately a body which
generates gravity).